In response to the theme of Forces, I made a Simple 3D Third-Person-Shooting Survival Game using Unity 2019.2.0f1.
By setting some constraints to myself during developing this game, I explored new way of display data to the player (instead of normal UI).
Similar work has been produced by Daisuke Ashihara, whose manga World Trigger used different size of cube to represent the amount of Trion (kind of superpower introduced in this manga).
This time I set those rules for myself:
No text should be displays
Use no more than 3 colors
No traditional UI such as health bar
I didn't use any text in this game and only used gray, cyan and orange colors.
For the UI, I use the volume of player/enemy to represent the health point, use volume of bullet to represent the damage it will cause, and use a single rotating cube as UI to represent the amount of energy the player currently have.
I also tried shooting from side not middle cause I think it should be cool.
The color of bullet was same with the player and the enemy's bullet is the same color with enemy. But due to the shape of enemy is also same with it bullet, it is hard to distinguish which one is the enemy and which one is its bullet. Because I set a rule of number of colors, I can't change the color of enemy's bullet to make it easier to see, and at the point I realized this problem, I have already finished the codes that calculate the volume of both enemy and enemy's bullet, so it was hard to change the shape of enemies. The method I chose to fixed this problem was switching the color of player's bullet and enemy's bullet. It might still make player confused a little bit cause the enemy is shooting bullet with the same color of me, but I can not find other better solutions that time.
I used a 3D sphere as the aiming point because I can not just use a normal 2D sprite in the middle of the screen as a aiming point due to the rule 3. I tried to use a sprite land on the point but it looks not good beacuse the textures was overlap. So I tried to use a sphere instead of a 2D circle. But there is another problem that the sphere will be too small to see when the player is aiming very far. So I scale the sphere by the distance of the aiming point and it works better.
Game Introduction:
This is a very simple survival game that there is no way to win, the game will reset automatically after player have no hp remaining. Press and hold mouse botton will generate a bullet, release the button will shoot the bullet to the point the camera is facing at that moment. The longer you press the button, the bigger the bullet, the bigger the damage of this bullet, also the bigger consumption of energy. The growing speed of the bullet is liner to the time you hold the button, but remeber the volume is the cube of the edge length, so it will looks like the bullet is growing slower and slower, but is not actually. Same for the size of player and enemy.
Every 5 seconds there will be a enemy born in the air as long as there is currently less than 8 enemies in the world. Enemies will generate bullet with random size, firstly the bullet is very small, and will grow to the determined size with constant speed in volume. Once it reach the size, it will shoot to the direction that the player is currently in.
Note that the bullet before shooting can be destoryed by bullets.
Key Binding:
W, A, S, D or arrow keys to move
Space to jump
Left Mouse Button to shoot from left
Right Mouse Button to shoot from right
R to play again
Esc to quit the game
By Deno Zhang
Email Deno Zhang
Published On: 07/05/2020